Verifying system requirements for using FSE in a Hyper-V environment

Before you install FSE, check that your system exceeds the minimum system memory and
disk space requirements for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You need more than the minimum amount of memory and disk space for Exchange because too little available memory or disk space may impact the ability of Forefront to scan large files.

If both the Exchange and SharePoint products are installed on the same server, only Forefront Security for Exchange can be installed to protect Exchange. You can't install Forefront Security for SharePoint on that same server to protect
SharePoint.

About FSE virtualization guidelines

After you have verified that your computer meets the requirements for running Exchange Server in a Hyper-V environment, check that your host computer meets the following guidelines:

The host computer must have enough hardware resources to accommodate the virtual machines being deployed and their intended roles, and the host computer should be deployed with only the virtualization role.

Memory and CPU intensive applications should not be run on the same host computer as the virtual machine.

File-level antivirus scanning should be disabled on directories hosting the guest virtual hard drives (VHD). If you use a third-party file-level antivirus program on a server containing Forefront Security for Exchange Server, you must
ensure that the following program folders are not scanned in order to prevent corruption of FSE:

<Drive:>\Program Files (x86)\ Microsoft Forefront Security

(or whatever folder in which you installed FSE)

<Drive:>\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server

The file-level antivirus scan can also cause a conflict when FSE tries to scan e-mail messages.

The following are guidelines for the virtual machine on which FSE will be installed:

The size of the guest .vhd file must be a fixed value. Predefining the size of the .vhd file ensures that the host computer does not run out of hard drive space.

For performance reasons, it is recommended that you choose Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) or Internet SCSI-based (iSCSI) storage in order to host the FSE database, preferably separately from the guest operating system.

File-level antivirus scanning should exclude all necessary Exchange and FSE directories. See the steps above for disabling the file-level antivirus scanning.

Snapshots in guest virtual machines are strongly discouraged and are not supported.

You may encounter network bottlenecks if you are running more than one virtual machine and the host computer only has a single network card. You should add a second network card and create an additional Virtual Network adapter. Network
bottlenecks may also occur if you are running more than one virtual machine and the host computer only has a single hard drive. Ideally, each VHD should be on its own hard drive to prevent slowdowns due to multiple VMs accessing the same physical hard drive.

Tuning performance

Adding FSE increases the resources utilized by your Exchange environment. To ensure that your virtual environment can handle the anticipated load from Exchange and FSE, it is recommended that you measure the performance counters before and after installing
FSE.

Based on the differences in the performance data from before and after the FSE installation, you may want to adjust your virtual hardware requirements. This can include allocating more memory, CPU affinity, and improved disk I/O. Memory and CPU utilization
are usually the most heavily impacted by FSE.

Optimizing guest and host operating system settings

Because guest and host operating system settings such as video, sound cards, floppy disk drives, and virtual hardware require resources, it is recommended that you configure all nonessential items for "best performance." If you are not using it, you may
also want to consider disabling or removing any nonessential item. This helps optimize performance in general of both the guest and host computers.

About process counts

Be cautious when adjusting the number of processes you want running per server for the FSE scan jobs (transport or realtime scan jobs only), as this can quickly deplete memory resources in your virtual machine. For example, transport scanning is set by default
to 4 process counts. If all 4 are in use, then the number of selected scan engines is multiplied by the number of transport processes in use plus the size of the files being scanned. The utilization of the process counts might multiply if Hyper V is not configure
properly.

For example, if you are using the default transport process count of 4, the maximum of 5 scan engines for the transport scan job, and each engine is using 100 megabytes (MB) of memory, then you can estimate the overall memory utilization by using the following
computation:

Memory is quickly exhausted if you increase the transport or realtime process counts, add more scan engines, and increase the bias. In most cases, the default number of process counts is adequate; however, you should consult
Transport Scan Job and
Realtime Scan Job for more information on fine tuning these settings. Additionally, use the performance data you collected earlier to help gauge how many process counts you should be using.